Barlowe, Wayne - God's Demon

Impulsively, keeping her eyes on Sargatanas', she reached out and touched him, running her pale fingers down his steaming forearm and feeling the heat of his flesh and bone. The touch burned but in a way that sent a thrill through her. She saw his eyes widen fractionally, but he did not pull away, and she put her other hand upon the hand that covered his wound and slowly, purposefully, pulled him to her. She heard a release of breath, deep and hollow, and suddenly, with a fervor that surprised her, he crushed her to him, closing his eye and wrapping his heavy arms around her.

They stood motionless, holding on to each other in Hell's first embrace of love, for what Lilith deemed the most wonderful eternity she had spent. They were both unique yet alike, alone yet together. And Lilith knew that, for her, Hell was forever changed.

I am, indeed, in a new world.

* * * * *

They lingered upon Sargatanas' disheveled pallet, in a room made hazy by the steam of their lovemaking. Lilith lay partially atop him like a dismounting rider, her nude body looking like highly polished ivory, slick with perspiration. He drowsed beneath her, his huge hand playing unconsciously with her sweat-tangled hair, his words few but endearing. The heat of him that was still spreading upward from between her legs suffused her entire body, warming her. Lilith had never felt more content. Her mind, enervated by the intensity of him, ranged back to those most ancient of memories, of the Man for whom she was created and of lost Lucifer, and she knew that neither could compare. Sargatanas' yearning hunger had been obvious and his skill amazing; she had found him nothing less than sublime in his passion. She had exhilarated in his power.

It was odd, she thought distantly, how so much about her existence seemed to center upon sex. The intent of her very creation had been about it. Her own Fall had indirectly been because of it. Her millennia of imprisonment had been to exploit it. With Lucifer it had always been about Lucifer. But with Sargatanas it seemed different; there was an equality about it, a give-and-take, a sense that she was someone,

in how attentive he had been. She ascribed this parity, in part, to her having reached out to him. And that, she thought smiling faintly, she would never regret.

She watched his scarred and broken chest rise and fall, saw the fire that lay within his torn breast—where his heart should have been—fade and glow, fanned with each breath. And she closed her eyes, thinking of the possibilities. She thought about what Hell would be like for her if he succeeded in his dream, with him absent forever. Or—and this was a pleasantly guilty thought—if he faded, what it might be like if he were not to leave.

DIS

A single week in a thousand-mouthed screaming-room at the mercy of a pack of Scourges had wrought changes upon Agares that would never be erased. When Adramalik saw him he straightened, tightening his jaw, for the former Prime Minister, once so proper and refined, could no longer stand as he once had. Nor would he breathe or speak as he once had. In fact, the Chancellor General was not sure, looking at him, whether on a cursory glance he could ready even be mistaken for a demon anymore. Which had been exactly what Adramalik had recommended his peer's punishment be. Adramalik now thought his own punishment, as severe as it was, was nothing in comparison to Agares' suffering. Of one thing he was certain: Agares would never be Prime Minister again.

Naked, he shuffled sometimes upright, sometimes on all fours, ahead of Adramalik, trailing a bloody train of flayed skin as he moved into Beelzebub's Rotunda. Agares had difficulty traversing the floor; pattering through its ankle-deep pools of blood and chunks of half-consumed meat made him strain and contort his twisted body so much that he occasionally let out wincing shrieks of pain. Apart from the very apparent rearrangement of his joints, every internal organ, feathered in exposed capillaries, protruded through innumerable holes in his body in a way that Adramalik could only think of as decorative. The whips and tongs and hooks had been very creatively applied.